Part
of the joy of people lambasting the Olympic opening ceremony (or anything else)
for being left-wing is in finding ways in which, despite any intentions of the
creators and the critics, it can be seen differently. The same would hold if
the closing ceremony were to be attacked for being right-wing. From this
vantage point, the Isles of Wonder opening was a Red Tory Blue Labour kind of a
ceremony.
The
scenes criticised for being left-wing were part of a narrative that took in the
industrial and digital revolutions and which delighted in the creativity of our
children’s literature, symbolised by J K Rowling reading from J M Barrie’s
Peter Pan.
Danny
Boyle, the director of the opening ceremony, celebrated the National Health
Service in general, and Great Ormond Street Hospital in particular, with a
scene involving hospital beds, dancing nurses, doctors and children as
patients. The Prime Minister rightly supported this by saying that, “We all
celebrate the NHS.” It is worth going a little deeper into the particular
example and then reflecting on the more general point. For a link between this celebration
of the provision of both hospitals and imaginative literature for children of
all ages is that Great Ormond Street has benefited from the rights to Peter
Pan, assigned by the author, J M Barrie, in 1929 and confirmed in his will,
when he died in 1937.
Barrie’s
legacy was the biggest, but by no means the only, example of the private
philanthropy that has supported Great Ormond Street and many other hospitals
way before the NHS came into being. The hospital began in the middle of the
nineteenth century. Its supporters included Lord Shaftesbury, a Tory
politician, campaigner for the poor and philanthropist, and Baroness Angela
Burdett-Coutts, a banker of the old school, known for her philanthropy. It was
championed by Charles Dickens. Royal patronage from Queen Victoria to Princess
Diana has kept this pioneering hospital in the public’s hearts. It is an
exemplar, like the opening ceremony itself, of the Prime Minister’s Big
Society.
As
a board member of the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Charitable Trust, which is
raising funds for a children’s hospital just as the government has decided to
focus specialist facilities elsewhere, I know that today’s services benefit
from over one thousand different funds which have been created in different
generations by philanthropists, mostly unrecognised, to support the work of
those hospitals.
More
generally, the expression ‘national health service’ comes from the Beveridge
Report for the coalition government in the Second World War, in 1942. Whoever
had won the General Election in 1945 would have implemented its proposal for a National
Health Service. The Churchill manifesto for the Tories in 1945 pledged that, “The health services
of the country will be made available to all citizens. Everyone will contribute
to the cost, and no one will be denied the attention, the treatment or the
appliances he requires because he cannot afford them... The voluntary hospitals
which have led the way in the development of hospital technique will remain
free. They will play their part in the new service in friendly partnership with
local authority hospitals…” This use of ‘free’ has, consciously or
unconsciously, been adopted and adapted for ‘free schools’. Some of the original supporters of free
hospitals were also at the forefront of the free or ragged school movement,
such as Lord Shaftesbury and Charles Dickens.
The
churches were pioneers of a thriving voluntary sector in health and education.
The modern Olympic movement, sometimes seen as a secular rival to religion, itself
derives its most famous sayings from the churches. The phrases usually
attributed to the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, both
have their origins in insights by priests, a French Dominican Catholic and an
American Episcopalian bishop. Coubertin acknowledged both and deserves credit
for appreciating their potential to capture important insights into sport and
life.
The
Olympic motto, ‘citius, altius, fortius’, the Latin for ‘faster, higher,
stronger’, was a tag created by Fr Henri Didon OP, a Dominican French priest
who promoted sport as principal of a Catholic school. He put the three
comparatives in the different order of ‘citius, fortius, altius’ which has the
advantage of having ‘fortius’ or ‘stronger’ as the pivot, imbuing it with a
wider sense of strength of character. He was himself a strong character who was
twice stopped from preaching and sent to Rome, then in the second case to
exile, before returning to France in 1890 as Prior of the College of Arcueil
for the last ten years of his life. The first time he was in trouble, he was
able to see Pope Leo XIII who supported and encouraged him by saying, "Devote
your knowledge, and all your science, all your eloquence, and all your powers
to youth. Bring them back to God and to Faith... Continue, Didon, continue." Coubertin knew Fr Didon and borrowed his expression as capturing the spirit of
his revival of the Olympics.
The
other great Olympic phrase, about “not the winning but the taking part”,
emerged from Coubertin’s interpretation of the sermon on 19 July 1908 of
Ethelbert Talbot, then the Bishop of Central Pennsylvania, at St Paul’s
Cathedral in the middle Sunday of the ill-tempered London 1908 Olympics. There
was considerable tension between the Americans and the British in the first
week of the Games, especially over the tug-of-war, with accusations of
cheating. The spectre of cheating continues to hang over every Games. Bishop
Talbot was in London that summer for the Lambeth conference of
Anglican/Episcopalian bishops, the first time US bishops had been invited to
participate. He addressed the ‘danger’ of the ‘new rivalry’ in the Olympics: “Well,
what of it? The only safety after all lies in the lesson of the real Olympia -
that the Games themselves are better than the race and the prize. St. Paul
tells us how insignificant is the prize. Our prize is not corruptible, but
incorruptible, and though only one may wear the laurel wreath, all may share
the equal joy of the contest. All encouragement, therefore, be given to the
exhilarating – I might also say soul-saving - interest that comes in active and
fair and clean athletic sports.”
The
sermon did not immediately affect behaviour, a phenomenon known to many
preachers and politicians. Two more controversies dominated the second week in
the 400 metres and the marathon race. The founder of the modern games, however,
had taken note (or, in some versions of history, had supplied the crucial lines
which would seem more influential if taken from an American bishop’s sermon in
London). Coubertin’s speech, at the banquet given by the government on the
following Friday to the members of the International Olympic Committee and
other dignitaries, drew attention (speaking in French) to that sermon,
interpreting Bishop Talbot’s words freely as, “The importance of these
Olympiads is not so much to win as to take part.” Coubertin said these words
formed the foundation of an important philosophy of life: “The important thing
in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have
won but to have fought well.” Gradually, over the next quarter of a century,
the Olympic movement adopted this as its credo, in word if not always in deed.
The
whole opening ceremony, with its mass participation by diverse and gifted
volunteers, had the air of a glorious school or parish or village pageant or
procession or pilgrimage or mystery play. The country’s headmistress entered
into the self-deprecating, good-humoured spirit of the show when the Queen
played along with the James Bond myth. The opening ceremony’s genius means that
London 2012 already has a legacy. It could be summed up in the words of the
hymn, ‘Abide with me’, so beautifully sung by Emeli Sandé, which come from the
King James’ translation of the Emmaus story where the disciples do not
recognise Jesus but ask him to ‘abide with us’. They were trying to make sense
of what had happened. By sharing (with someone they took to be a stranger)
their quarters, their bread, their conversation and their hearts, they came to
see the risen Christ in their companion on the road to Emmaus. In trying to
make sense of our Olympic journey, we too might learn to abide with God, with
one another and especially with those whose politics we think we can’t abide.